Master of Education (by coursework & dissertation) — Adult Education postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The form that started this was a forklift licence renewal. A colleague in our warehouse, a man in his fifties who had driven forklifts for twenty years, asked me to fill it in for him at my desk in the payroll office. He could read the questions slowly, but he did not trust his spelling, and he did not want the younger supervisors to see him struggle. I filled it in with him, reading each line aloud while he answered. Afterwards he asked whether I knew anyone who taught adults to write.

I did not, so with the agreement of our HR manager I began running an informal session in the staff canteen on Wednesday evenings. That was three years ago. Most weeks between five and nine people attend, mostly warehouse staff and two cleaners, with home languages including isiXhosa, Sesotho and Afrikaans. I have no teaching qualification, and I have had to learn by watching what works. Early on I brought photocopied children's readers, and the room went quiet in a way I recognised as embarrassment. Since then we have used material from people's own working lives: payslips, leave forms, safety notices, WhatsApp messages from the school their children attend. One participant now writes the minutes for her stokvel, which she told me she had avoided for years because someone else's handwriting was always preferred.

This work connects with my undergraduate training more than I expected. My BA Honours in Linguistics included a research project on code-switching in hand-painted signage at a taxi rank near where I grew up. I photographed and transcribed around sixty signs and interviewed six traders about why they mixed English, isiXhosa and slang. What I took from it was that people who are labelled as having low literacy often manage sophisticated written choices for specific audiences. The traders knew exactly who each sign was for. That project made me sceptical of treating literacy as a single skill that adults either have or lack, and I see the same thing on Wednesday evenings.

Reading has helped me give shape to these impressions. Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed challenged me to think about the difference between depositing information and starting from learners' own situations, though I have also found it hard to translate his ideas into a forty-minute session after a long shift. Malcolm Knowles's writing on andragogy was useful for its emphasis on adults' experience and their need to see why something matters, but I have begun to wonder whether its assumptions fit learners who left school early through circumstance rather than choice. I want postgraduate study to give me the theoretical grounding and research methods to examine questions like these properly, rather than relying on instinct.

The dissertation topic I am considering grows directly from the canteen: how workplace literacy learners in multilingual settings decide which language to write in, and how informal programmes might build on those decisions instead of correcting them. I would expect to refine this considerably through coursework, particularly in research design and ethics, since my participants are also my colleagues and I am aware that this relationship complicates consent and honesty.

Outside work I sing tenor in my church choir, where I also keep the attendance register and the small music budget. My payroll job has made me careful, organised and comfortable with deadlines, and it has taught me how much ordinary documents shape people's working lives. I hope to bring that practical awareness, along with my linguistics background, to a Master's in Adult Education, and eventually to work in workplace or community education where adults are treated as capable learners from the first session.